Sumer Johal at Xamplify

This is archived version. References are at bottom of the page.

Overview

It was around August/September of 2002, about 2 months since Sumer Johal had to leave Xamplify abruptly, when I did a quick internet search for his name and was surprised to find that he had emerged as a bioinformatics expert since I was not aware of him having background in bioinformatics. My initial reaction was that it had to be someone else with the same name, but after checking other information, unless it was a big hoax by someone else using his name, it seems like Sumer Johal was being himself once again.

My Observations

He was the favorite of all top-level executives including Jeffrey Klein, Bob Burnett, and Bob Oliver, who all spent much time with him.

His Background

A person of same name as his attended Saint John's school in Chandigarh, India.¹ My educated guess is that that person was Sumer Johal himself. He graduated in 1988. In 1991, he became a freshman at M.I.T. where he started a Bhangra club² and was part of a team which won a prestigious robotics competition.³ MIT Class of 1963 (Professor Berlekamp graduated in 1962 and 1964) gave him a scholarship when he was a junior, and their newsletter mentioned that⁴

Sumer S. Johal, a junior from Austin, Texas, is in two UROP programs; one in electromagnetic field theory and the other in aircraft vision systems. He teaches, choreographs, and performs in MIT's North Indian Folk Dance Club.

MIT Class of 1963 renewed his scholarship and mentioned that he was in an M.B.A. program.⁵ Sumer Johal defended his M.S. thesis titled ,"A Study of Cost and Performance Trade-offs in a Semiconductor Wafer Fab," and his supervisors were Prof. Stephen C. Graves of Sloan School of Management/Leaders for Manufacturing and Dr. John Yasaitis of Analog Devices.⁶

MIT's '96 Class Notes mentioned in November 1997 that "Sumer Johal is at Analog Devices starting a Decision Support Department and understanding the complex inter-relationships in a manufacturing environment."⁷ About that time Analog Devices opted to use AutoSimulations' AutoSched software to improve its workflow and Sumer Johal was quoted in a trade publication.⁸

Sumer Johal led his Bhangra team to many successes⁹ and seems like he was interested in improving his golf game too.¹⁰ About same time he, along with others started a Sikhism-related group on internet.¹¹

Apparently by middle of 1999, he was in the Bay area working as VP of engineering at a marketing start-up C-Tribe.¹² By middle of 2000, he was listed as Chief technology officer at Xamplify and his qualifications read:¹³

Sumer Johal is Xamplify's Chief Technology Officer. He is an expert in real-time information transfer and scalable, secure design. As Vice President of Engineering at C-Tribe, an e-commerce-based affinity club company, he was responsible for the implementation of wireless, IVR and Internet sites, leading a team of contractors and developers through two full-lifecycle product launches. He also designed and deployed market analysis, email marketing, and data-capture tools for large-scale targeted marketing.

Previously Sumer founded PSG, Inc., a consulting practice specializing in the architecture, design, and implementation of IT frameworks for clients including Nortel, Hewlett-Packard, AT&T and British Telecom. He was also Senior Operations Research Engineer at Analog Devices, Inc., where he conceived and designed plant-wide automated scheduling software to improve manufacturing efficiency. Johal graduated from M.I.T. with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and an M.S. in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, specializing in programming techniques, scalability and computer architecture.

While he was working at Xamplify, in its March 2002 issue, MIT '96 Class Notes noted that¹⁴

Sumer Johal ... teaches Bhangra and Gidda (Punjabi folk dances) at Berkeley, where his team won first place in competition "Dhol Di Awaaz"! Sumer also started Tae Kwon Do at the Berkeley YMCA and invites alums to join him in studying under his instructor from MIT.

Apparently Sumer Johal had to abruptly leave Xamplify around middle of 2002 and soon afterwards the following regarding Sumer Johal appeared on bay Area's Bioinformatics Consultants website:¹⁵

Expertise: Application and product development, data mining, database development, bioinformatic algorithms, large-scale distributed knowledge bases, Internet development, browser technologies, stochastic methods. Modeling physical, chemical and biological processes. Numerical methods, efficient large scale matrix algorithms, protein structure prediction, protein sequence analysis, multiple alignment, Hidden Markov Models

My Experience

COMING LATER.